Thursday, March 10, 2011

Taste and time

We have been doing what we do long enough now to observe an evolution in the public's architectural taste and thought it would be interesting to highlight a few of the watercolors that have come to the forefront over the years and examine why. Of course this has nothing to do with contemporary architecture but only applies to the range of historical subjects we treat, but with our exhibitions and through the sale of our note cards we've seen strong and definite trends develop and it's certainly worthwhile looking more closely into what lurks behind them.

From the outset, we have drawn the full range of traditional architectural styles: neoclassicism, baroque, rococo, Chinoiserie, neo-gothic, rustic, and exotic—a variety of building types: chateaux and pavilions; garden follies in the form of grottos, pagodas, trelliswork pavilions and tents—and the gamut of garden ornament: vases, ironwork, sculpture, fountains and other details.

The surprise favorite to appear from our first exhibitions at Didier Aaron—at least to me—was an unrealized project for an octagonally planned trelliswork pavilion designed in the early 1680s for Louis XIV's gardens at Trianon. Between us opinions were divided as to its architectural merits (I must admit I found it naive and awkward and bizarrely conceived—what a dark, dank, wretched spot the central fountain would have been, set under that huge expanse of roof). It took some time and persuasion for Bernd to convince me to include it in the show, and I grudgingly dubbed it "the Cheese Bell" because of its massive, baroquely curved, wood-shingled roof.

Bref, the Cheese Bell was a huge hit. It and another large watercolor were purchased immediately by a well-known Manhattan-based fashion designer and his wife and it could have departed with several other gallery visitors. (Oh, how we envy photographers, for whom an original constitutes an edition of eight prints!) A few years later, in the late House & Garden, we spotted the watercolors hanging prominently in the living room of their country house. We launched our note cards soon after the show and the image was far and away the bestseller of an already rather large collection and remained so throughout the late 90s.

Having been proven so thoroughly wrong, I wanted to fathom the mystery of the Cheese Bell's success. Well, it certainly evoked gardens quite powerfully with its forest-green trelliswork, and this led us to create several other treillage pavilions which surprisingly left the public indifferent. In fact one of them, a personal favorite for us both in design and execution, lingers inexplicably orphaned to this day, so obviously trelliswork was not the key to its popularity.

We had drawn several domed structures for the first show, the Cheese Bell among them, and this, along with the alchemy of the pavilion's other attributes, was the key to its appeal. People love domes. They give three-dimensionality effortlessly to the flat elevations we draw, which one gallery visitor summed up by remarking, "I love the rich perspective you've created with the dome." Of course an elevation is not a perspective, but the comment was perfectly true. I've also come to believe that domes subconsciously evoke the maternal breast—they are round, generous and comforting; not sharp-edged and rectilinear.

In general though, in the late 90s taste was evenly divided between pared-down neoclassicism and the most sober of Chinoiserie, represented by the Belvedere at Trianon (with its soft, low dome) and the Pagoda at Chanteloup, a picturesquely tiered stone building with a classically columned base.

With 911 all that changed dramatically. (As an aside, its aftermath was also devastating to the art world at all levels and it took long, difficult years for the public to regain its interest in art.) When the public did return, it delighted in the rustic and anything having to do with nature—intimations of a rural, arcadian past and evocations of earth and gardens. The most popular watercolors from that time were simple, small-scaled, approachable; a moss-covered, Medicis-form urn from the Château de Raray sums up the mood.

In the last few years before the Crash of '08 (just as it had on the eve of the French Revolution, it must be noted), interest in the exotic and in "imaginative" Chinoiserie simply exploded. Despite the implications of history repeating, this remarkable wave of enthusiasm has been gratifying as Chinoiserie has been an abiding interest of ours, and nothing captures this yearning for fantasy and escapism better than an unrealized project for a garden niche at Trianon designed for Marie-Antoinette. A bold, light-hearted, theatrical pastiche, this small, flamboyant structure has had a simply magical appeal.

In the past year, this watercolor, which has become iconic for us, has been replaced by another that has again surprised us much as the Cheese Bell did—a small neoclassical pavilion from the late 18th century that once stood in the gardens of the French estate of Romainville. Sun-struck, unassuming, flanked by orange trees in Versailles planters, it has gained steadily in popularity practically by stealth.

It is a dramatic shift in taste from exoticism to classicism, but the appeal of an intimate, almost miniature scale remains constant. The building is in no way unique and in fact is quite similar to several other small pavilions we have drawn, but this one has captured the imagination as the others have not. As to the why, we believe it is due to its approachability and human scale, to the solidity and reassurance of its simple form and the justness of its detailing, the openness suggested by its large, glassed, arched door and oblique windows, and to its unforeseen power of evocation—who would not want to spend a summer's afternoon in and about such a structure, especially today?